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Stories
Scribner
February 2019
On Sale: February 12, 2019
240 pages
ISBN: 1501192701
EAN: 9781501192708
Kindle: B07GNVM6FL
Hardcover / e-Book
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Trade Size (reprint - February 2020)
Fiction Family Life
An intimate, sparkling collection of stories by a debut writer about girls behaving badly and families on the brink of collapse. In these lucid, sharply observant stories, Mandeliene Smith traces the lives of men and women in moments of crisis: a woman whose husband has just died, a social worker struggling to escape his own past, a girl caught in a standoff between her motherβs boyfriend and the police. A lively and insightful collection, Rutting Season is dark, humorous, and moving, filled with complex characters who immediately demand our interest and attention. In βWhat it Takes,β a teenage girl navigates race and class as the schoolβs pot dealer. βThe Someday Catβ follows a small girl terrified of being given away by her neglectful mother. βThree Views of a Pondβ is a meditation on the healing time brings for a college student considering suicide. And in βAnimals,β a child wrestles with the contradictions inherent in her familyβs relationship with the farm animals they both care for and kill. In barnyards, office buildings, and dilapidated houses, Smithβs characters fight for happiness and survival, and the choices they make reveal the power of instinct to save or destroy. Whether sheβs writing about wives struggling with love, teenage girls resisting authority, or men and women reeling from loss, Smith illuminates her characters with pointed, gorgeous language and searing insight. Rutting Season is an unforgettable, unmissable collection from an exciting new voice in fiction.
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